Presidential speechwriters - 23 February 1990

Of course the most moving event of the week was the appearance and the speech of President Havel of Czechoslovakia before a joint session of both Houses of Congress.

Time and again cries of "Bravo!" went up and five times he was accorded something that happens to a presidential address only once, at the end of it – namely, a standing ovation.

An extraordinary thing about the speech was noted in press and television reports of it – he wrote it himself. This astounding fact was mentioned only a day or two before the publication of a book by the young woman who is more responsible than either President Reagan or President Bush for the popular view of their characters.

She is Peggy Noonan – a witty, lyrical, Irish girl who wrote the speeches through which we came to believe we were seeing the true, the charming, the inspiring Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

In fact there's an alarming discovery available in Miss Noonan's book, it is that practically all the most famous, the most winning, the most characteristic – of both presidents – the clever or moving catchphrases by which their presidencies will be remembered in the books and specially on the resurrected television clips, were composed by her, from "You ain't see nothing yet!" and "Make my day!" to "Read my lips!" and "A gentler, kinder nation".

For Mr Bush especially, Miss Noonan was the alchemist who at a stroke, in the nomination acceptance speech at New Orleans in the summer of 1988, transformed our picture of George Bush from that of an intense wimp and a rather awkward speaker into a generous, kind and surprisingly eloquent practitioner of English prose.

There was never a poll directly charting the effect of that speech on the voters but there were two polls that parallel the remarkable change in the popular view of M. Bush's character. Before the New Orleans speech, Mr Bush was running a few points behind Mr Dukakis as the general choice for president. After it, Mr Bush went ahead in comparative popularity and never looked back.

And even when Miss Noonan left him and the White House, the remaining speechwriters who had questioned and hounded the style she'd compose for him, they adopted it as best they could and maintained the character she had created.

So that, or perhaps not so that, but either by accident – but more likely as one natural consequence – Mr Bush today finds himself approved by a solid 75% of the nation, a loveable peak achieved in our time only achieved by John F Kennedy in his first term.

President Kennedy, I ought to say, also had his Henry Higgins. His immortal, incessantly-quoted inaugural speech was written by Mr Theodore Sorensen who stayed with him and on all formal occasions impressed, ever deeper, on our ears and our consciousness the figure of a young, gallant and intensely moving orator.

I emerged from Miss Noonan's book with mixed feelings, of wonder and distress. The distress arises from the growing discovery that I'm not sure I know, even now, the true character of either Ronald Reagan or George Bush. Are they, as a famous journalist once asked about a dozen celebrities he'd tracked down for private interviews, are they the same at home?

So it was a shock, and a pleasant one, to realise during the hour that Mr Havel spoke, that here was both the private and the public man we were listening to. At one go, the first time we ever heard him, he provided the sort of rare satisfaction that must have come to people listening for the first time to Lincoln or Winston Churchill.

There was a time, less than a month after the United States came into the Second World War, when, at Christmas time, Prime Minister Churchill arrived suddenly – his flight across the Atlantic was, of course, unannounced – arrived suddenly in Washington to stay with President Roosevelt.

Well these two had met, incidentally, for the first time, to survey the theatres of war and sketch out a common strategy. Toward the end of this now-famous visit, the two leaders agreed that within a few days of Mr Churchill's safe return to London, each of them would go on the air and broadcast to the peoples of the new transatlantic alliance his own inspiring version of their discussions.

There was a firm, but unwritten, agreement that the two broadcasts – radio, of course – would fall on the same evening. The American radio networks were made privy to the arrangement and, while Churchill was flying home, Roosevelt wasted no time in summoning three of his most dependable and gifted ghosts, Judge Sam Rosenman, the poet Archibald MacLeish and the playwright Robert Sherwood, to compose as soon as possible and, in view of the formidable competition, a piece of memorable prose.

They were, next morning, not much further along than a first draft when they had a telephone call from London to the effect that Mr Churchill was safe at home and was going on the BBC that very evening. He was requesting the president to have the American networks clear a circuit for simultaneous broadcast.

Roosevelt was appalled at this cunning betrayal. It seemed that during the boisterous 13-hour homeward flight, bouncing through murky weather (no jets in those days) and some time, while taking over the controls of the bomber, the traitor Churchill – with no other points of reference than a map of the world – had dictated a masterly conspectus of the global battlefronts.

The tape, or the cylinders, were delivered to a secretary in Downing Street, typed up, the BBC was at the ready and the prime minister went on the air with his rumbling, majestic cadences.

In Washington, there were at least four despondent listeners. "How," moaned President Roosevelt to his slaving ghosts, "how can he do it? How did he do it?" It was the playwright Sherwood who gave the melancholy answer, "I'm afraid, Mr. President" he said, "he rolls his own." It was nothing but the truth. Never again did Roosevelt agree to a prearranged joint broadcast or consecutive broadcasts.

Well, as I say, the rare if not unique pleasure of listening to President Havel sprang from the knowledge that "he rolls his own". It's a pleasure that was bound to be felt most acutely by writers, by actors, by voters who have a prejudice in favour of a man who has a way with words.

On the other hand, speech writers in the White House are known, half-enviously, half-contemptibly, as wordsmiths. Once the writer's draft has been submitted to 50 departments, 50 government departments had questioned and torn apart and returned, it's assumed by then that the body of the speech, the substance, the right stuff, is all there, like the structure of a new house.

Now it's up to the wordsmith to perform his or her particular function, which is that of a decorator. No wonder Miss Noonan lasted only three years. The record of the corrections, rejections of her originals, the stuffing of them with clumsy jargon, all the pretentious buzzwords that luxuriate like weeds in the Pentagon, the state department, the office of management and budget. The almost paranoid fear by government types of simple idiom, homely phrases, natural humour, pungent lines... once this long agony has been endured, the writer submits a final draft.

Then the chief of staff must look it over and then, at last, hand it to the puppet, the speaker. The president, no less. And then the writer, Miss Noonan, sits with her fingers and her talents crossed and listens to the speech itself. And hopes. And sighs. So that had to go! Or "hugs a friend" – they left it in, they left it in!

And next week, the Challenger shuttle will explode in mid-air, and she must begin again. And did, to compose that most touching and poignant of all President Reagan's eulogies to American dead.

Mr Havel spoke sometimes in English – warm, resonant, simple English. More often, he spoke in his native language followed paragraph by paragraph by the translation. I said just now that writers, people who enjoy words and the handling of them are the ones most likely to have enjoyed Lincoln, Churchill and now President Havel.

There's a catch here and Mr Havel made us know that he's aware of it. People with a fondness for literature always vote for a candidate who seems to have the gift of words over one who doesn't. Hence, the deep disappointment of legions of us when Adlai Stevenson lost to General Eisenhower.

And intellectuals tend to vote for intellectuals whenever they appear as political candidates. Mr Havel noted that the men who declared American independence and who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and Jefferson most of all, were intellectuals. And he noted this fact almost wistfully.

He must know that, apart from that astonishing and that unique generation, intellectuals have a very poor record as politicians. He himself, a playwright, made quite clear that he is not a politician and does not mean to be.

His confession reminded me of an unforgettable remark of Clement Attlee when, after the Labour landslide at the end of the Second World War, Harold Laski was made chairman of the British Labour Party and moved, for the first time, into the practice of politics.

Here was a vastly learned man, a world authority on the history of governments, of syndicalism, of democracy, of Communism, a top-notch professor of political science.

Laski was, frankly, a political flop. Pondering on his failure, Prime Minister Attlee put it simply, "Rum thing about Harold. Never got the hang of it."

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